There are a variety of different types of Internet radio services. Generally speaking, many Internet radios services permit a user freedom to subscribe to individual internet radio stations and to also create their own individual Internet radio station. The creation of an individual personalized Internet radio station may be based on user-provided preferences such as an initial song, a genre, or artist. The user preferences are used as a “seed” to generate the song playlist for a personalized Internet radio station. Additionally, in many approaches, a user may also input song ratings which will influence the selection of songs.
Thus, many Internet radio services permit each individual user to listen to their own personalized radio station or to subscribe to a station managed by another. However, this means that two different listeners will generally not be listening to the same songs at the same time. Additionally, there is no live DJ providing live commentary to facilitate social interactions over the air. As a result, many types of social interactions common in conventional AM and FM radio have not been possible in Internet radio services. Moreover, many types of social interactions in Internet Radio are still relatively primitive compared with social interactions in social media.
Embodiments of the present invention were developed in view of the above-described problems in providing social interactions in an Internet radio service.